Monitoring, Maintenance, and Updates (Apps Governance)

In this chapter, you will learn about app management and how to interpret dashboard numbers to keep track of your app’s performance and optimization.

We start by understanding workload units (WUs) and explore how these units quantify resource utilization and its impact on the app’s functionality and operational costs.

Transitioning into the daily life of an app owner, we talk about updates, version control, and app governance, important subjects for any company building no-code applications.

Monitoring your app’s performance, maintaining it, and keeping it updated are important steps after deployment. Valuing user feedback and making data-driven decisions according to user experience are key to making sure your app is a success.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Understanding dashboard metrics – An explanation of WUs and usage
• App management...

Understanding dashboard metrics – An explanation of WUs and usage

After deployment, your goal will be to analyze what is happening with your application. You will be collecting a lot of information about your users and important data that can be used to optimize your app’s performance and user experience. We are going to cover more on that later. In this section, we will focus on the dashboard metrics related to your app’s performance and WUs consumption, as this plays a huge part in how much your app will cost to run monthly.

What are workload units (WUs)?

WUs serve as a measurement of the system resources utilized by your app. It is the amount of work that Bubble does to power your application. They represent and quantify the computational resources used when your app performs various activity types, such as database queries, workflows, file uploads, API calls, and calculating a total. This metric measures all the underlying activities your app performs...

App management – Versioning control, updates, and production to Live

When building a digital application, the work is never done. If you don’t know that, you must understand that the deployment of an application doesn’t mean it is done; a digital product is never done, finished, or completed. On the contrary, when you launch a product, it just means the journey has just begun. Luckily, working with digital products allows you to test things fast and fix issues by simply pushing a button. This flexibility is key to continuously improving products and finding out what works best. Since the dynamics of building products involve always improving them and making them better, it is important to keep track of your versions and updates, managing what is still in production and what is live.

Versioning control

Depending on how you or your team work together, there will be cycles of development; in the agile world, we call them sprints. They usually last one or two...

App governance – Defining responsible people in your organization

App governance becomes an important topic when a new application becomes part of your company. If you are building a startup, it is natural that the CEO and development team will be very focused on the app and making sure it is being taken care of, but if you are using no-code tools to create solutions for a company that primarily has other types of applications or core activities, for instance, during a digital transformation process, it will be important to define who is going to be responsible for maintaining the application and the future development, maintenance, and decision-making processes.

With a culture of citizen developers emerging inside companies, which is a good movement, more and more apps are going to be created by different individuals in different areas of a company. The impact is positive but also has to be handled in an organized way. The bigger the company is, the greater the number of...

Monitoring app performance and user analytics

In the previous chapters, we talked about the various tools you can use to test your application’s performance. These tools are very helpful for you to test things before your app’s deployment, but they are also important in the long run. Some tools should be manually checked from time to time. It can be always before a new deployment or periodically; you decide. Other tools allow you to set up alerts and let you know in case things go wrong. As mentioned before, there are a lot of tools you can use right inside Bubble to help you monitor your app via the existing dashboards, but you can also plug in new tools on top of your application that can send you messages and notifications to let you know if the application is working properly or not. We recommend you check the plugins marketplace to find helpful plugins. For instance, you can track if your domain is up, if the app is working, and how your users are interacting with...

Handling maintenance and addressing user feedback

Effective app maintenance involves an ongoing process to address bugs, optimize performance, add new features, and incorporate user feedback. Responding to user feedback, whether through direct communication or feedback mechanisms within the app, fosters user engagement and loyalty. Having direct contact with your users is also very beneficial in helping you understand if you are building the right thing. Combine user feedback with analytics tools so that you have qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate when making decisions.

Embracing user feedback is important to keep your app growing and better satisfy user needs. However, this also doesn’t mean that you are going to build everything users ask for; be mindful about what you will and won’t build based on user requests, and remember that you, as the founder, have to know your end goal and keep your vision alive while guiding the development of the app. Do listen...

Summary

In this chapter, we’ve covered the essential aspects of managing your app by focusing on monitoring, maintenance, and updates. After publishing your app, these topics are crucial for a successful web application. You’ve learned about dashboard metrics, which provide insights into app performance, and we have delved into workload units (WUs) for measuring resource use. We’ve also discussed app management, covering updates, version control, and the different environments inside Bubble, production, and Live.

This chapter also guided you on how to handle your app’s governance and ongoing maintenance, considering user feedback and analytics tools to deliver the most important features to your users.

Understanding these concepts is important for maintaining a live app and continuously building a strong and user-friendly experience, ensuring sustained success while prioritizing user feedback. In the upcoming chapter, we will dive into advanced Bubble...

Further reading

• For more information about plans and WUs, visit the Bubble manual: https://manual.bubble.io/account-and-marketplace/account-and-billing/pricing-plans#workload-units.
• For more information on version control, please refer to the Bubble official documentation available here:

  https://manual.bubble.io/help-guides/getting-started/navigating-the-bubble-editor/deploying-your-app.